Yesterday, MUSCATE facility at CNES produced 1141 Sentinel-2 L2A products in a day, while the previous record was 762. A few glitches had reduced the production on the previous days, and yesterday allowed us to catch up the back log. At the same time we have started producing data acquired in 2016 for several zones outside Europe and Africa. The total number of L2A products in MUSCATE now amounts to 33071. Congrats and thanks to the development and exploitation teams !

Hurricane Harvey hit Texas on August 25. The first Sentinel-1 image of Houston since landfall was acquired on Aug 29 at 00:26 UTC. I'm writing this post at 21:09 UTC. As reported by the local news website chron.com "The most severe flooding is around the Highway 90 and Eastgate areas". This is also what we can see on the image comparison below: dark areas are flooded areas:

Images are orthorectified VV backscatter in dB (-20 dB is black, 0 dB is white). The backscatter intensity received by Sentinel-1 drops over flooded soil because the emitted electromagnetic waves bounces off the water surface and thus do not return to the antenna (as explained in this post).

The real products from the new Venµs satellite, will be time series of high resolution images of the Earth (not Venus planet) acquired every second day on more than 100 sites. But to get these time series, Venµs needs to be on its nominal orbit, which will be reached beginning of September. Anyway, we are happy to share the first images taken from the satellite, just to let you know that Venµs camera, memory and downlink work as expected ! It is already a lot, and after the usual debugging, verification, calibration and assessment, we will soon get our time series.

One of Venµs first images acquired above Phoenix (Arizona, USA), with a lot of irrigated fields.

Back from a long summer break, I needed to find something else to do than just catching up with emails... Luckily, the organizers of the 2017 International Glaciology Society meeting in Boulder tweeted this animation of the Vavilov Glacier (October Revolution Island, Russian Arctic):

Referring to the news of 11 August , users are informed that the contingency issue occurred at Matera has been solved and nominal Sentinel-2A/B production was restarted yesterday 16 August in the early afternoon.
An inventory of the missing production is being consolidated and all impacted S2A/B L1C products will be recovered in the coming weeks, together with the ongoing recovery of missing products between 1st and 8th August as reported in the news of 09 August .

Done ! All Sentinel-2 data acquired above Italy, Switzerland and Austrian Alps, and processed at level 2A, are now available on Theia website! The data format is described here. We would be very thankful if users in Italy or Switzerland could help us spread the news among remote sensing users in both countries.

The level 2A product provides surface reflectances with a good cloud and shadows mask. The processing is done at CNES, within MUSCATE facility, using the MAJA software, developed by CNES, CESBIO and DLR. The production started with data acquired in December 2016, and will go on in near real time.

That's bad luck, just before the long week-end of the 15th of August, ESA Sentinel-2 ground segment failed and ceased production. This explains why Theia ground segment is not producing in real time anymore.

As a consequence of a ground segment contingency occurred at Matera station, the publication of Sentinel-2 products in the data hubs is temporarily interrupted as of today 11 August. The anomaly is under investigation and the data dissemination is expected to resume by mid of next week.